20 "Beautiful" Eggs... and the $30,000 IVF Lie (Stage 1 Diary Series)

Donor Egg IVF?

Search for IVF on YouTube and you'll find a million interesting real people going through their experience. But specifically search for donor egg IVF, crickets, silence. Three and a half years ago, that silence was infuriating. I was forty-five. I knew nothing about donor eggs, and I was looking for that emotional lifeline.

I didn't just want to see the clinical steps. I wanted to know how to cope with the feelings and the thoughts you wouldn't or couldn't share with your own partner. I just wanted to know I wasn't so different from everyone else who was actually on the same journey. But even more importantly, I wanted to deal with this privately.

I wasn't ready to ask questions. I wasn't ready to talk it out with others because at the time, speaking the truth out loud would have made the nightmare feel so much worse. I needed to experience things through someone else's eyes in total privacy before I could even face my own [00:01:00] reality. This is Donor Egg Diary, my very own solution to that very problem.

Today, I'm forty-eight years old. I'm eleven weeks pregnant with our donor-conceived child, and I am officially a clinic graduate.

You're seeing me behind this funky witness protection silhouette because I'm here to share the raw, often taboo truth about our own donor egg journey, while still protecting my family's privacy. This all started with the $30,000 beautiful lie that almost bankrupted our souls. I'm nauseous, I'm exhausted, but I am sharing my life with a dancing bean who's currently growing fingernails.

To fully understand this as a win, however, you do have to understand the worst day of our entire married lives. This is stage one. We've been in an infertility war for at [00:02:00] least a decade. Most people don't see the demolition. They just see the baby at the end, or they don't see anything. At 45, the life script says you should have the house with the acreage, the two dogs, the cats, the guinea pig, and three teenagers driving you crazy.

That's where all our friends were. But to fund this final stand with my own eggs, we did the unthinkable. We sold our house and moved into a 500-square-foot trailer. It wasn't that the trailer was a bad place, it was that we were so far off from the normal map. We were professionals, but because we couldn't tell anyone where our money was going, it looked like we were moving backwards.

We looked like, honestly, complete losers to our friends and family. Ugh, and my coworkers, I didn't even wanna know what they thought. I was a professional, but in my head, I was terrified of them finding out I was going home to a trailer in a parking lot every day while they were talking about their kitchen remodels.

That is a special kind of isolation, when your greatest sacrifice looks like a [00:03:00] complete and utter failure to the outside world

The bean counter voice in me was absolutely losing it. It was doing the math on a life that just didn't add up. It was screaming, "$30,000, really, for one more cycle when you don't even have a car that runs properly? When you're living in a parking lot and the world thinks you're a loser?" That voice was the only thing trying to save us from ourselves.

It was counting every cent of our dignity that we had left, which honestly wasn't much. But my mama bear wasn't listening to the math. She was deaf to the numbers. She was ready to trade every last dollar we had and every shred of our professional status just for the chance to meet her baby. Yeah, maybe the bean counter was right.

It was reckless. But when you're desperate to find your child, reckless is pretty much the only language you speak [00:04:00] We finally reached our IVF with our own eggs against all odds, we did retrieve 20 eggs. At my age, 20 eggs is a bloody miracle. I felt great. Hubby was proud. I'd never seen him so proud in my life.

I'd responded to the meds like a champ. I assumed my fierce mama personality had finally bullied my biology into working. The embryologist even called the eggs beautiful But here is the truth we didn't know about until it was too late. Grading is just a visual beauty pageant. A 4AA or a 5AB embryo looks great on the cover, but PGTA testing, which is genetic testing, is the actual DNA story inside the book.

We didn't want to take any chances. My risk-taker voice was saying, " If you want a sibling, you can't waste time on the wrong egg." We were so sure our beautiful eggs were the answer to that. [00:05:00] We were scheduled for a transfer in less than 48 hours. In fact, I had the bags packed, we were raring to go, hotel booked.

We sat in our trailer at 2:00 PM waiting, then the phone rang

The genetic counselor had the kindest voice. She said, "I'm so sorry."

Every single one of the eggs we tested had multiple chromosomal issues. That's when my jaw literally fell open. I looked at my husband and I saw a single tear hit the floor. He was trying to hide it from me, but I could see it. He had been so proud of me

At that moment, he actually challenged her. "All of them? Why?" Then I heard it. "Your age is the primary factor, most likely." [00:06:00] I felt a paralyzing shame. I felt like I had bankrupted our future because I was just too old. I felt like a piece of trash that should've been thrown away. I was thinking thoughts I couldn't even tell them.

I remember thinking, "I should just let him go. All he ever wanted to be was a dad, and I betrayed him"

We sat in silence for 30 minutes. It was the worst day of our married lives. He went his way, and I went mine, which was an eerie thing to experience because we always talked about everything. But that afternoon, there was just nothing left to say

But as I sat there in that silence, I did look at my husband. I just saw a man who had stayed in that 500 square foot war with me. I thought of him. [00:07:00] I really, really thought of him. And in that moment, what I did next to dishonor such a tender moment even surprised me.

But hey, grief is a hell of a drug. Next time, stage two, the white noise call. I'll see you in the next episode